Tag: University

KinectMagic – A Kinect Wizard Duel Game Prototype

In my studies at the HTW Berlin, I had a course called “Independent Coursework” where I could choose to work on any project relevant to my studies. I chose to work on a Kinect multiplayer game which should also be interesting to watch. Most important to me was that the game uses what the Kinect does best in my opinion: Spacial movement. I didn’t want any repetitive gestures, just a direct relationship between the players and their avatars. So, together with my fellow student Jana Leinweber I set out and developed, and a few months and a dozen iterations later we had this:

KinectMagic

Create spells! Attack! Defend! Dodge!

Tactical spellcasting meets fast reflexes in this
duel game for two wizards and a Kinect v1.

Download for Windows

KinectMagic - A Kinect Wizard Duel Game Prototype

Read more... (494 words and 12 images, estimated 1:59 minutes reading time)

Beer Pong HD for Android

I’m currently in the process of posting all the games and prototypes that I made years ago and never published. This post (and the next one) are special though – because the games were published, just not by me. I made those games for other companies.

The first one is Beer Pong HD for Android. Back in the days when I worked in the Netherlands as part of my studies, I made its first version (further on, other developers expanded it) with Unity for Codeglue.

It seems the original promo video is not available anymore. Here is the best video that I found (made by Androida.it). I suggest you jump to 4:16 for gameplay:

Beer pong HD per Android

What is still available is the video how the AI finds out which ball throws end up inside a cup. I didn’t just want to calculate how to hit the middle of the cup because that might look too artificial, but I still wanted to be able to predict whether a throw hits, even if multiple jumps on the table or cup’s edges are involved. Here is a video of the AI “training” and finding out which throws hit:

This is how the AI in Beer Pong HD works

(And the best part is that it takes some time and is automatic. Time for a cup of coffee – or an office sword fight. I like being a programmer.)

 

Android-Shooter

After I published my master’s thesis, a few people asked me about what I did for my bachelor’s thesis. I experimented a bit with controls for an Android shooter. Here is a video showing the game I did there:

Asset Credits:

 

Master’s Thesis: Evaluating the Advantages of Physical and Digital Elements in Hybrid Tabletop Games

Preface

A few weeks ago, I finished my studies at the HTW Berlin in International Media and Computing with the defense following my master’s thesis. I thought that its content might be interesting to others on the internet too, but I understand that not everyone wants to read 100+ pages. For that reason, I am now writing this “too long; didn’t read” summary. It is also a lot more informally written. If you like what you read, you are quite welcome to read the longer version too! Here are the links:

Master’s Thesis

Source Code (open source, MIT license), Screenshots, Photos, Videos etc.

You can also read this summary as a PDF, but you would miss out on the videos.

Read more... (4458 words and 12 images, estimated 17:50 minutes reading time)

Heart of Decay

At the HTW Berlin, the International Media and Informatics master has room for up to two bigger interdisciplinary projects. It probably doesn’t surprise anybody that I chose to work with the game design course on both occasions. I’ll make a blog post about the second project later, but for now our trip down memory lane brings us to: Heart of Decay, a 3D person shooter with a skill system, but sadly we never really got that far. Here is a gameplay video of the slice we were working on:

Heart of Decay Gameplay

Credits:

  • Tobias Wehrum: Programming
  • Romano Grasnick: Enemy Concept, 3D Art
  • Jean-Emily Fleck: 3D Art
  • Daria Döpper: Level Design
  • Tim Höregott: Game Design, Team Lead
  • Jennifer Ludwig: Character Modeling, Animation
  • Lisa Krummen: Art Direction, Concept Art
 

Retcon: A Multi-Round Game Which Records & Replays Your Moves

Over two years ago, a theme in university was action recording/replaying, and instead of doing a boring text editing app to demonstrate this, I made a game. Introducing:

Each round your previous actions are replayed,
but your and your enemy’s actions will change the
outcomes of previous moves by placing new tokens.

You can play the game in your browser or download the Android APK.

Retcon: A Multi-Round Game Which Records & Replays Your Moves

I think the concept is quite intriguing, but the current execution is flawed. Currently, the tokens of the current starting player start first which leads to fluctuating patterns. Also, no matter how experienced you are in the game, you still cannot beat new players who grasp the concept by a significant score and even you pull of a cool move that should get you in the lead, it often doesn’t really matter much.

What I really like though is being the starting player in a round can both be an advantage and a disadvantage: You will move first and can force the second player to defend a certain position, but in certain situations you might need to defend an important position before the other player moves to attack there – and then the other player obviously will place somewhere else.

Anyway, long story short: I might make another game based on the recording/replaying multi-round concept in the future and I sure hope that one will be a lot more fun. More years of experience have to be good for something, right?

Retcon was made by me, with assets by:

 

webcat

For a university course, I was tasked to make a thing with JavaScript/Crafty. Since I am not particularly fond of HTML5, I wanted to do something playful that I couldn’t do with any other technology. Please welcome with me: webcat.

webcat

webcat

1) Take this link up there and drag it to the bookmark bar or favourites.

2) Go to some other page (Wikipedia works well, for example).

3) Click on the bookmark/favourite “webcat” link!

There isn’t anything to do but running around and double-jumping, but hey, now you can add a cat to any webpage you want!

Credits:

 

Zombie Planet, A Game Prototype For The Leap Motion

For the Human-Computer Interaction course at my university we had to do a 3d interface prototype. My team decided to make a game with the Leap Motion. And thus, Zombie Planet was born in about 3 weeks: A game that you control directly with your fingers.

Zombie Planet

Zombie Planet, A Game Prototype For The Leap Motion

Use your fingers to strike the zombies
with lightning and throw asteroids at them!

Defend your world against the invading
undead and save your people!

Download for Windows

Screenshots

Credits

Made with Unity 3D.

 

Zombie Planet, A Game Prototype For The Leap Motion (Gameplay Video)

For the Human-Computer Interaction course at my university we had to do a 3d interface prototype. My team decided to make a game with the Leap Motion. And thus, Zombie Planet was born in about 3 weeks: A game that you control directly with your fingers. Defend your world from invading zombies and save your people!

Zombie Planet, A Game Prototype For The Leap Motion

Visit this post for the download, screenshots and credits:

Zombie Planet, A Game Prototype For The Leap Motion

 

Wizard Defense: A Cooperative Augmented Reality Game

It sucks to be cursed. It sucks even more when you’re standing paralyzed in your own wizard tower while your arch-enemy sends hordes of hungry ghosts to gobble up your mana. Luckily your telekinetic powers are still working fine, and now you are defending yourself by redirecting energy beams from your hands with mirrors and whatever else is at hand.

Wizard Defense

You’re paralyzed. Enemies are closing in.

Redirect the energy beams with mirrors to hit the ghosts and
change their colors at the right time to exploit each ghost’s weakness!

A cooperative augmented reality game for two friends and a webcam.

Play it in the web player!
(Download and print the markers!)

Download it for Windows/Mac/Linux!

The source code is available further down in this post.

How to Play Wizard Defense: A Co-op Augmented Reality Game

You can quit the game by pressing Escape while the menu console is showing.

Solo Play?

If you play alone, you might have some problems – it’s made for two players. If you still want to play alone, here are some cheats you can press after the first ghosts spawned so you can at least experience the gameplay: F10 triples the power of your energy beam, and F11 makes you invincible.

Open Source

This was one of my three big projects this semester, this one for the Augmented Reality course. It’s built in Unity 4, with NyARToolkit to recognize the markers. The japanese documentation makes NyARToolkit a little bit hard to read, but good examples and method names go a long way and we had a lot of fun using it.

You can download the source code and Unity 4 project here. The source code is released under the terms of the GPL v3. The assets (meshes, textures etc) are not released under any particular license. Unless mentioned otherwise on their respective source websites stated in the credits, you are not allowed to use them. If you’d like to use them anyway, feel free to contact me. (Disclaimer: The project was for a university course. Due to time constraints and that not being a requirement, the code is not well documented nor does the documentation fit the C# standards.)

Credits

Screenshots

Finally, have a few screenshots: